Cardiacs
Seaside Treats Video/12"
Fanzine 1985
A REVIEW, YOU’VE GOT TO BE JOKING! The CARDIACS are crap! Well…if you insist (this Consultant fella is 6′4 - 11 inches taller than me).
I saw this band about a year ago supporting Marillion and they were about as popular as a pork sausage in a synagogue! Now a year later I’m pressganged into writing a review of the single. In fact, I discover it’s not a single at all, it’s a little package. I’m intrigued. In this little package comes a badge, a poster a 12 inch single and a Video. Important things first, the badge wow! It now has a permanent place on my coat. It’s monochrome with a drawing of a house and a man as seen through the eyes of a young child. So far I’m impressed. The poster is not quite so brilliant, a drop in the artistic level as some people would or wouldn’t say. Again, it’s monochrome, a picture/photo of them sitting round a table with their faces smeared in something or other. And so to the video. After thirty seconds I was singing along, not because the music was catchy, far from it, but because the song had stuck with me, unknown, for the past 12 months.
The next fifteen minutes was an experience I never want to re-live. This video is not frightening, it is deeply disturbing and there’s a difference. The images could be those of childhood but from a child’s point of view (hence the badge?). The ‘Seaside Treat’ is a double image, it is also a paradoxical one. In one little house there is the image of waste. The world wars, a beach landing, a real treat! An image of youth being led unknowingly into a situation which no one should ever have to face. In another little house there is a different image, a day out at the seaside with candy floss and donkey rides. It is the same house.
This video coupled with the 12" are in the same vein as Lynch’s ‘Erazerhead’. But why is it so disturbing? Maybe it’s because it is so original, the only influences I can detect are Bowie circa ‘69 and Siouxsie Sioux. Maybe it probes the subconscious - forgotten childhood memories stir, things you are not meant to remember come to the fore, tantalisingly there, just under the surface, but out of reach. The overall effect is shocking, I couldn’t even watch the end of the whole final track, it was too grotesque, I’d had enough! Tomorrow I’ll probably watch it again and see it as light-hearted.
Until then however, I’ll just sit here, staring, and then maybe go to bed.
Here stands a convert.
